In this undated photo, visitors look at information boards in Kuaishou's booth during a high-tech exhibition in Beijing. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
In the Chinese mainland’s popular online-streaming industry, virtual gift-giving is big. You can send your favorite live performer anything from a rose for 5 yuan (80 cents) to a space rocket for 500 yuan.
The present is just a symbol, but the money is real — and that’s what’s made Kuaishou Technology so successful.
The ByteDance Ltd rival has become the biggest live-streaming platform for virtual gifts, with more paying monthly users than any other in the world. The firm, which takes a cut of the tips fans give to performers, raised US$5.4 billion in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in the biggest internet initial public offering since Uber Technologies Inc in 2019, terms for the deal obtained by Bloomberg show.
That’s poised to create at least four billionaires with a combined fortune valued at US$15 billion, based on the ownership disclosed in Kuaishou’s prospectus. Co-founders Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao will each be worth more than US$5.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Kuaishou, which means “fast hand,” is one of the mainland’s biggest internet success stories of the past decade, part of a generation of startups that thrived with backing from Tencent Holdings Ltd. Along with TikTok parent ByteDance, the outfit pioneered the live-streaming and bite-sized video format that’s since been adopted around the world by the likes of Facebook Inc.
“The key resource of the internet is attention,” Su wrote in Kuaishou’s official biography in 2019. “It can be focused on large numbers of people like the sunlight, rather than a spotlight just on a certain group of people. That’s the simple logic behind Kuaishou.”
Su, a native of the mainland’s central Hunan province, studied computer programming at the prestigious Tsinghua University before joining Google in Beijing in 2006. There, he earned about US$23,000 annually, eight times the country’s average salary back then. While he said he was “extremely happy,” a stay in Silicon Valley inspired him to start his own business, according to Kuaishou’s biography.
The 38-year-old quit Google during the global financial crisis to start his own video-advertising venture, which didn’t come to fruition. After a short stint with Baidu Inc, he got acquainted with Cheng in 2011 and they soon decided to pair up. In 2013, the duo transformed the Kuaishou app from a GIF-maker to the social-video platform it is today, initially gaining popularity with its videos of life in rural mainland.
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While virtual gift purchases are still its bread and butter — they make up almost two-thirds of its revenue — the company is delving deeper into higher-margin businesses like e-commerce and online gaming. Its sales rose almost 50 percent to 40.7 billion yuan in the first nine months of last year, according to the IPO prospectus.
Viewers spend an average of almost 90 minutes on Kuaishou every day, and about a quarter of monthly users churn out content as well. While that robust engagement differentiates Kuaishou from rival live-streaming platforms such as Joyy Inc and Momo Inc, the recent launch of a short-video feed by Tencent’s super-app WeChat has brought competition to another level.
Kuaishou’s debut could also be overshadowed by the potential IPO of its far larger rival, ByteDance, whose 600 million Douyin daily users are more than double Kuaishou’s.
“Kuaishou has overhauled its product and become more similar to Douyin,” said Citic Securities Co analyst Wang Guanran in a Jan 26 note. “The two will face direct competition with each other in the future.”
Investors have been rushing to get a piece of the first short-video platform that will start trading Feb 5. The IPO priced at the top end of its marketed range, and the retail portion was the most subscribed ever, according to IFR, as the city’s market for new listings has been on fire lately. Some shares changed hands at more than double the listing price of HK$115 in gray-market trading on Monday, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The enthusiasm last year boosted the fortunes of top executives including those at Nongfu Spring Co’s Zhong Shanshan — now Asia’s richest person — and Blue Moon Group Holdings Ltd’s Pan Dong.
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The Kuaishou founder is cautious about the power he’s amassed. In the company’s biography, Su compared his platform’s ability to control internet attention and traffic with the One Ring from JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
“When you put on the ring, you’ll feel extremely powerful,” he wrote. “But in fact, it’s the ring and the power that are controlling you.”